Beat the church level. When I got to the second part I was frustrated that nothing was dying, and eventually brought the terrain down(up?) on EVERYTHING, and then decided to explore to find the end of level thing.

Health packs didn't work though.

As for your test enviroment I put it on to the max setting and it was fun to romp around on. Would make for some really interesting death matches if you make terrain kick you away when it's formed. Nvidea GTX 560M

@lithosThanks a lot for the test .Yes, the current levels are actually really not clears, dued to my crappy designer talents ! I hope i'll get better, with a lot of work, ha ha !In fact health packs are power-ups , and they work only if "cypher" weapon is selected (another confusing stuff, that's true, i have to change model...).Currently being trapped into new matter makes you die actually . In fact i didn't want to make multi, but i'm about to change my idea .

While i'm here, i can give a few news : the editor progresses well (soon i'll be able to place boxes into levels, amazing no ? ).Otherwise i still work on terrain generation. recently i felt on a terrific algo to dig pretty underground galleries (ridged multi-fractal noise, conceited no ?). moreover, i decided to add textures. After several failures with classical textures (uv correct computation, which demand the normal of all points, but geometry is only stocked on graphic card to gain memory...), i thought about 3D textures procedural generation. It's only the beginning, but here is the result with classical chessboard texture :

The goal is to allow the player to generate different types of random textures in the editor .

For the smoothing normals, yeah it would be fine but it's difficult in my case because the geometry is in numerous separate vbo/display lists and currently i can't know which triangles own a point... Difficult but NOT impossible ! I guess it may cost a few neurons, but i'll think about it .

Otherwise, i'm glad to share with you my evening progresses in texture generation : soon numerous shapes will be available because i just succeeded to implement random perturbations of a repetitive shape. the result can currently look like this :

After having realized (lately) that the main problem in a marching cube system is the memory, i worked on it and decreased dramatically the volume of the terrains. So bigger levels generation is now available .Exemple : this "naked" 400x400x100 voxels terrain :

Its size is "only" 213 Mo, which lets the possibility of really huge environments on a current computer. The problem in that case is the generation time which is currently slow, but numerous optimizations can still be done . I think with a bit more of work infinite terrains (with threaded generation) will be available, it's not really the goal of the project but it would be cool ^^ .

sorry, there still isn't a new demo because this week i lost time again on the code... but it's for a right cause : i succeded at least to get smooth normals from terrains . (without shader nor GPU manipulation, nor more memory use, which wasn't so easy )Graphically, that doesn't suit to all shapes, but combined to broken grounds it could give some kind of "liquid" aspect that can fit to the project :

Otherwise i abandonned the 3D textures for good old 2D ones because i found an efficient (and simple) way to map UV's on any terrains (but textures must have some features : tileable + symetric according to the diagonal, but procedurally it's not difficult to generate ).

Now i can go back to my new level to put a new demo online quickly ^^ .

For the shaders, i can't ! It's not a joke, i currently develop on a laptop that doesn't even support GLSL...But you're right, it would be fine, and i'd love even to try some GPGPU for this project .Arf, soon it's my birthday .

For the shoots, yes, i will add a new weapon which will do that (a machine gun) for the intensive shooting times .

Otherwise, still no new demo , i progress very slowly on some new level... I hope it'll be complete next week.

I walk back out of my coffin again (hin hin) to give a few news of this project abandoned for numerous mounthes.

To calmly take it up again, i tried to take advantage of the code functionalities to start a cubes sceneries system (it would be cool to provide this possibility, and it fits well to the game vectorial design ).

A few screens ?

So here is the result of my debuts (a little map generator), after a week (cubes really simplify a lot of things !), that i submit to your merciless judgement :

About this last point i'm puzzled : each cube takes 1 byte in RAM so hugest maps in the demo (1024x1024x256 cubes) must take 256 MB, how can it cause problems with 1024 MB of heap (i don't think the rest of the app takes 768...) ? Have you an idea ?

@opiop65Thanks a lot !Actually it's not the most innovative idea of the year , i consider it most as an ingredient we could use among others, maybe it would be fun to mix these different styles of scenery in same maps ...

@BurntPizzaThanks !Well, the cubes are stocked in a simple bytes array :

1

privatebyte[][][] types;

There's also a 2D array of vertical chunks that read this bytes array to build geometry and send it to chipset as VBOs.Each chunk only stores 6 floats for frustum and its VBO id.Is there a trap somewhere that i don't see ?

Well each array is an object and thus has an object header and etc, according to this article, about 12 bytes. And then there is padding bytes to align the objects to the 8-byte granularity. So each byte[][][] is actually ~16 bytes I believe. Don't quote me on any actual numbers, but my point is that a byte[ x][y][z] takes up a lot more space then x*y*z bytes.

You could probably do a lot to help with this by collapsing it to a one-dimensional array (a byte[x*y*z]), so as to not have so many sub-array objects.

Thank you very much !!Actually i didn't consider a n-dimensionnal array is an array of pointers on some other objects (didn't know, shame on me it's rather important !) .I'll implement 1 dimension arrays quick !

I loved level 4 and 5 with the gun that messed with the terrain. As well as the gravity pads on the earlier levels. I did run into an exception it was throwing me though. It couldn't find the natives folder and I had to make a 'lwjgl' folder to put it in. Other then that it was smooth and fun to play.

I'd love to see a level with that random terrain you have been messing with. Just set the player up in a room like that with the blow up gun and let them go to town.

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